The Eddas, Sagas and Tales of Iceland (42 books) The medieval literature of Iceland occupies a remarkable place in European literary history. Produced in a society on the far northwestern edge of Europe, much of it was written down in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, yet it preserves traditions that reach considerably further back, into the Viking Age and the centuries of settlement that followed. Its surviving literature encompasses poetry, mythology, heroic legend, historical narrative, family history, biography, law, and religious writing. Among these works, the Eddas and the Icelandic sagas are the most famous and, for modern readers, perhaps the most immediately compelling. They are very different kinds of literature, however. The two Eddas are principally concerned with myth, poetry, and the legendary past of the Scandinavian world; the Sagas turn their attention to human beings, families, feuds, journeys, marriages, friendships, and struggles for power in the world of medieval Iceland. Taken together, they provide an unusually broad view of the imaginative and historical consciousness of medieval Iceland. The PROSE EDDA , traditionally attributed to the Icelandic poet and statesman SNORRI STURLUSON (c. 1179–1241), is the more systematic of the two Eddas. Its first major section, Gylfaginning, recounts a succession of stories concerning the gods and the creation, ordering, and eventual destruction of the world; Skáldskaparmál explains the elaborate metaphors and mythological allusions used by poets; and Háttatal provides an extended demonstration of Old Norse poetic meters. The work is therefore at once a handbook of poetics, a treasury of mythology, and a prose retelling of some of the stories that lie behind the older poetic tradition. Its importance is difficult to overstate: without Snorri's work, our knowledge of Norse mythology would be considerably poorer, and many mythological references found in the older poetry would be much more difficult to understand. Rather than being a single work by a known author, the POETIC EDDA is a collection of anonymous Old Norse poems, principally mythological and heroic, preserved in manuscripts of the medieval period, most famously the Codex Regius. The poems include Völuspá, the great prophetic vision of the world's creation and destruction; Hávamál, a collection of wisdom poetry associated with Óðinn; poems recounting encounters among the gods; and a sequence of heroic poems dealing with figures such as Sigurðr, Brynhildr, Guðrún, and the tragic Völsung tradition. The collection offers not a single coherent mythology or narrative but a constellation of poems, voices, and traditions. Unlike the Eddic poems and Snorri's mythological prose, the SAGAS OF ICELANDERS (Íslendingasögur) are predominantly prose narratives centered on Icelanders and their descendants, particularly during the period of settlement and Commonwealth (c. 870–1262). Their subjects are strikingly varied but often intense ![The Eddas, Sagas and Tales of Iceland (42 books) [TorrentX]](/posters/web-34e5245d38c1.jpg)